‘Final Fantasy VII Remake’ Will Be Episodic, Not Entirely Action Based

Final Fantasy VII PlayStation gameplay trailer has been releasedThe Final Fantasy VII remake from Square Enix announced at E3 earlier this year has a new trailer courtesy of today’s Playstation Experience keynote. The PlayStation Experience event in the US gets bigger every year for Sony, and although there were no major new first party announcements there were plenty of brand new reveals – including a number of exclusive games for PlayStation VR. While much of the trailer appeared to show CGI cut scenes, there were a few shots of what gamers can expect when it comes to bashing their thumbs on the controller.

We’ve collected all the most important trailers below but Koei Tecmo’s Ni-Oh also looked surprisingly good, considering it’s by the creators of Dynasty Warriors. One difference appears to be that the game, which was first released in 1997 and became an instant classic, is now an action role-playing game with real-time combats. And although the new King Of Fighter XIV looked rather disappointing there was the welcome news that classic SNK fighter The Last Blade 2 will be coming to PlayStation 4.

That means a cleaner, higher resolution Cloud Strife; a cleaner, higher resolution Barret Wallace; and of course cleaner, higher resolution sidewalks (and other environmental stuff). Square Enix also announced on stage that the PC->PS4 port of will be out today, in case this trailer has you in the mood to revisit the adventures of Cloud and his sword. Also revealed was a new Sparrow racing mode in Destiny: The Taken King – which starts on December 8 and last for only three weeks. (Sparrows are the usually fairly superfluous speeder bike-like vehicles in the game.) On top of this was a mountain of indie game announcements, including Klei’s excellent Invisibile, Inc. and the co-op orientated Don’t Starve Together. The game is reportedly taking its visual cues from the 2005 film Advent Children and will also make “dramatic changes” to FF7’s classic battle system. Real-time and GMC are the trends these days. “However, what makes Final Fantasy and RPG different from other games is that the players have the ability to choose weapons, capabilities and magic to be strategic minded, so while the new game has more real-time element, it will also maintain that strategy building element, balancing these two factors perfectly to enhance the gaming experience.” Most of the major characters from the original game do appear in the two minute-long trailer but gamers who do not have a PlayStation 4 could be out of luck as it is expected to only be released on the Sony console at first.

Which option you chose in the demo, which showed protagonist Nate meeting up with his long lost brother, didn’t seem to make much difference, but perhaps that’s only something that will become apparent later in the game. After shocking the gaming world with the remake’s reveal at E3 in June, the trailer above shows the first fleeting glimpse of Final Fantasy VII’s revamp in action. While Kitase confirms the new real-time combat system, you can also expect classic RPG elements as players will be able to choose their weapons and more. The Capcom Cup tournament is also due to take place in San Francisco this weekend, as Sony continues to take Street Fighter V very seriously as an exclusive. There was only a brief mention of Psychonauts 2, but that’s because PlayStation VR is getting its own exclusive pre-sequel called Psychonauts: The Rhombus Of Ruin.

Sony has been curiously quiet about this ‘re-imagining’ of the very first Ratchet & Clank, apparently because it’s a tie-in to an animated movie that keeps getting delayed. For us this was the biggest news of the night, and perhaps the spookiest example yet of Inbox magic – considering a reader was only asking about it on Friday, when we lamented that creator Tetsuya Mizuguchi seemed to have semi-retired. Trying to recreate old pixel-based games in 3D has become relatively common recently, but we’ve never seen a game that handles the mix of old and new school like this.

The only thing we knew about this year’s PlayStation Experience ahead of time is that there’d be a lot about PlayStation VR, and indeed there was. Flying simulator Eagle Flight from Ubisoft looked particularly good, but there was also the surprisingly self-explanatory 100ft Robot Golf; the Crazy Taxi-esque The Modern Zombie Taxi Co.; unknown quantity Golem; and a promise of Namco combat flight sim Ace Combat 7. Another sequel we would’ve bet on never seeing, this is a brand new collaboration between Level-5 and Studio Ghibli (and so nothing to do with the Japanese-only DS game).